After advising Glia as part of the executive advisory board for more than a year, Jay Choi joined as our new Chief Product Officer in April 2023. Jay brings deep product strategy and development experience along with strong category building expertise. At Qualtrics, he was instrumental in creating the Experience Management category that landed the company in the top spot of both the Forrester Wave and Gartner Magic Quadrant and a $25B+ IPO.
Jay is in his first month at Glia where he’s bringing together product strategy, product development and product marketing into a single team focused on the Glia Interaction Platform. He brings an infectious enthusiasm and unwavering optimism to his work.
We recently caught up with Jay to get his perspective on joining Glia and the opportunity ahead:
What attracted you to join Glia?
Before joining any company, I try to get a sense of what is unique—their special sauce and how they are positioned in a market. Specifically, I try to spend time in 3 main areas: Product, Potential and People!
Let’s start with Product. Does Glia have game-changing technology? Without a doubt. I knew this immediately when I saw the demo. Glia built a digital-first platform from the ground up, when all the other solutions are band-aids bolted onto an antiquated phone-first system. Factor in Glia’s sharp vertical focus to what is essentially a horizontal stack, and you see how very differentiated and unique Glia is.
Which brings me to potential. Glia has already created the Digital Customer Service category and we are just getting started. The opportunity is massive and we’ve got a tremendous opportunity to rethink the industry from the ground-up and redefine how businesses interact with customers.
I’ve been fortunate to work with Glia as a consultant for the past year, so I knew coming in how great the people here are. And since officially joining, I’ve been even more impressed with our culture and how collaborative and focused on the customer everyone is.
So what attracted me to Glia was our unique Product, incredible Potential and the amazing People here. I’m thrilled to be on board and ready to build our next chapter.
What is the biggest surprise you’ve experienced since joining?
The biggest surprise is how competitive our space is, yet our competition is still stuck in antiquated technologies. It’s shocking how our competitors all have solutions based on legacy phone systems with archaic technology and protocols. Which comes back to that massive opportunity ahead for Glia.
I see a parallel to the automotive industry, where car makers are trying to shift away from fossil fuels toward a more sustainable model. Now imagine car makers who continue to ‘innovate’ internal combustion engines without investing in electric vehicles (EVs) or even modern solutions at all. They are still in business today, but they will be left behind soon enough. Just as our competitors who fail to modernize their platforms for a digital world will eventually no longer meet customer expectations.
Think about how Tesla was the first company to create a commercially viable EV, establishing an industry lead which they need to aggressively maintain. That’s what Glia is doing right now with customer interactions. I think we can be just as disruptive for our industry introducing a new technology from the ground up.
What opportunity excites you the most for Glia going forward?
What excites me the most is Glia’s potential to redefine how people interact with companies, both internally and externally. I’ve had the privilege of creating new categories a few times in my career and it is hands-down one of the most rewarding things I’ve done. We have a very real opportunity here at Glia to create a new category that shapes the future of the customer experience. Plus we have a solid, highly differentiated product to drive that change.
Many companies develop ‘me-too’ products, then try to differentiate themselves through heavy marketing. Consider how many of our competitors are making big promises that their antiquated, phone-based products simply can’t deliver. I’m looking forward to building and extending our lead through our unique product offering and by defining what customer interactions mean. It’s more than having the best product. We need to inspire and that’s through category creation.
When I look into the future, I see no reason why every company shouldn’t use Glia to interact, share and collaborate. And this is what excites me the most—working together with the Glia team to reach that goal.
